I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.

This isn't anything like how a place like Google or Facebook works.

I would guess that the vast majority of developers (I daresay 100% of them) posting on HN would not like to work at a place like that.

I think it's a mix of both - I'd kill for anyone at my current job to spend more than a bare minimum of time on their acceptance criterion so I don't just feel like I'm writing code and hoping it does vaguely what the person wants. What the GP is describing feels a bit too far in the other direction, but I'd almost rather it trend towards having an over-prescriptive ticket I can push back on then playing telephone with another department because they gave me 3 sentences of writeup for a month/quarter long project.

At a product company, the lead engineer(s) and the product manager, who is a direct everyday member of the engineering team, collectively own what the product is supposed to be. There’s not someone else two departments away who is a more legitimate authority on what to build.

That's horrific.